Page 89 of The Dangerous Dance

I sit very still so I don't wake him.

The room is quiet. The burner phone is silent. Viktor has his message and will sit with it until morning.

I have tonight.

I think about a safehouse and an unlatched window and a circulation check done twice, and about a man who said I'm in love with you like it was a fact he'd been sitting with for a while and had finally found the right moment to put down somewhere it would be heard.

I think about what it means to be the thing someone stays for rather than the thing that holds them.

I look at the ceiling for a long time.

Then I close my eyes.

And I stay.

CHAPTER 26

Nadia

I wake up in the compound on a Saturday morning feeling like someone I don't entirely recognize.

This is not new. I've been feeling like someone I don't entirely recognize for approximately six weeks, with increasing frequency and decreasing alarm about the frequency, which is itself a change from the version of me that arrived in New York two months ago with a cover story and a plan and the specific confidence of someone who has always been the most prepared person in any given room.

I am still prepared. I am still — professionally speaking — the most capable person in most rooms I enter. That hasn't changed.

What's changed is the weight of what I'm prepared for.

I lie in the grey morning light of the room Liam showed me to last night — a guest room on the second floor, which he indicated with the careful deliberateness of someone who had thought about the optics and made a choice — and I think about Viktor's timeline and the Antwerp shell flag and the week I bought with last night's message.

I think about the capsules.

The capsules are in a drawer at the safehouse. They have been there for five days. Viktor thinks they are still in my coat pocket, waiting. The story I've been telling him is the story he gave me, slightly bent — the cardiac event needs to read as natural, which requires a public setting, which Liam has not been in. The story has held because, until yesterday morning, Liam has been visible and uninjured in his public movements, which is consistent with someone Viktor's asset is managing rather than someone who has switched sides. Yesterday morning, Liam stopped being uninjured. The story starts losing tension at exactly the rate Liam's face stops looking like a man who has not been in a fight.

The week of patience I bought last night is real because Viktor is still working on the assumption that the capsule operation is dormant, not failed. The moment he begins suspecting it has failed, the week becomes nothing.

I have a week. Maybe less.

I let myself think about that for thirty seconds, and then I think about Dara.

Dara, who is in the apartment in Astoria keeping the light on, who told me to do what's best for myself and meant it without reservation, who has been in this operation because she was assigned to it and who I have not — despite everything I've told myself about protecting her — actually protected. Not yet. Not in any way that means anything beyond intention.

Intention is cheap. My father taught me that. What counts is what you actually do.

I am lying in a compound I was sent to destabilize, beside — in proximity to — a man I was sent to incapacitate, thinking about a friend I was supposed to be protecting and haven't, and feeling, beneath all of that, the specific warmth of a night spent with my head against someone's shoulder and his heartbeat slowing under my ear and neither of us saying anything that needed to be said because everything had already been said.

The guilt and the warmth coexist. I find I can't resolve them into one thing or the other, so I let them coexist and look at the ceiling and think about what today is.

Saturday. No briefing. No Viktor contact required until midweek. The Brennan secondary analysis can wait until the west corridor meeting on Sunday.

Today is, technically, nothing.

I'm not sure I know what to do with nothing.

Mackenzie appears at my door at half past nine with the specific energy of someone who has a plan and has already started executing it.

"You're awake," she says, leaning in the doorframe.

"Yes."